Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

  That’s not to say that the paper doesn’t have a long memory. Having once read in high school that violence is produced by underlying social conditions, the author of this appalling article refers in lenient terms to the goal of ridding Iraq of an American presence, a goal that may find sympathy among Iraqis angry about poor electricity and water service and high unemployment. Bet you hadn’t thought of that: The water and power are intermittent, so let’s go and blow up the generating stations and the oil pipelines. No job? Shoot up the people waiting to register for employment. To the insult of flattering the psychopaths, Bennet adds his condescension to the suffering of ordinary Iraqis, who are murdered every day while trying to keep essential services running. (Baathism, by the way, comes in very handy in crippling these, because the secret police of the old regime know how things operate, as well as where everybody lives. Or perhaps you think that the attacks are so deadly because the bombers get lucky seven days a week?)

  This campaign of horror began before Baghdad fell, with the execution and mutilation of those who dared to greet American and British troops. It continued with the looting of the Baghdad museum and other sites, long before there could have been any complaint about the failure to restore power or security. It is an attempt to put Iraqi Arabs and Kurds, many of them still traumatized by decades of well-founded fear, back under the heel of the Baath Party or under a home-grown Taliban, or the combination of both that would also have been the Odai/Qusai final solution. Half-conceding the usefulness of chaos and misery in bringing this about, Bennet in his closing paragraph compares jihad-ism to nineteenth-century anarchism, which shows that he hasn’t read Proudhon or Bakunin or Kropotkin either.

  In my ears, “insurgent” is a bit like “rebel” or even “revolutionary.” There’s nothing axiomatically pejorative about it, and some passages of history have made it a term of honor. At a minimum, though, it must mean rising up. These fascists and hirelings are not rising up, they are stamping back down. It’s time for respectable outlets to drop the word, to call things by their right names (Baathist or bin Ladenist or jihad-ist would all do in this case), and to stop inventing mysteries where none exist.

  (Slate, May 16, 2005)

  Words Matter

  ONE OF THE GREAT MOMENTS among many in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is when we find the young Albert Brooks manning the phones in the campaign office of the man we know (and he does not) to be a double-dyed phony. On behalf of the empty and grinning Senator Palantine, he is complaining to a manufacturer of lapel buttons. “We asked for buttons that said, ‘We Are the People.’ These say, ‘We Are the People.’ … Oh, you don’t think there’s a difference? Well, we will not pay for the buttons. We will throw the buttons away.” Part of the joke here is that the joke itself is also at the expense of Brooks’s character and his “candidate”—there really and truly isn’t much, if any, difference. Fan of Jerry Brown as I had been, I still winced when he ran on his lame “We the People” slogan against Clinton as late as 1992.

  Of course, in 1992, Clinton borrowed from an old slogan of John F. Kennedy’s: “Change Is the Law of Life.” Now, why did he annex that questionable truism, and why in that year? First of all, because he wanted to plagiarize the entire Kennedy effect for himself, and second, because he was the challenger and not the incumbent. When you are the incumbent, it is harder (but not impossible) to demand “change.” Senator Hillary Clinton, who wants to run as the “change” candidate—because, well, because you can’t so easily run as a status quo candidate—also wants to run as a stability-and-experience candidate. Hence the repeated alterations (or “changes”) in her half-baked slogans. By the time the plagiarism row had been started by her very ill-advised advisers, she had run through: “Big Challenges, Real Solutions”; “Working for Change, Working for You”; “Ready for Change, Ready to Lead”; and “Solutions for America.” Senator Obama, meanwhile, had picked the slightly less banal and more cryptic mantra “Change We Can Believe In,” which I call cryptic only because at least it makes one ask what it can conceivably be intended to mean.

  It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be “charisma?”) it exerts. Take “Yes We Can,” for example. It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake. As for “We Are the People We Have Been Waiting For” (in which case, one can only suppose that now that we have arrived, we can all go home), I didn’t think much of it when Representative Dennis Kucinich used it at an anti-war rally in 2004 (“We Are the People We Are Waiting For” being his version) or when Thomas Friedman came across it at an MIT student event last December. He wrote, by the way, that just hearing it gave him—well, you guess what it gave him. Hope? That’s exactly right.

  Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps ten keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible. (How could one state, for example, the famous Burkean principle that many sorts of change ought to be regarded with skepticism?) In a rather poor trade-off for this veto on complexity, many views that are expressible (and “We the People Together Dream of and Hope for New Change in America” would be really quite a long sentence in the latest junk language) will, in turn, be entirely and indeed almost beautifully unintelligible.

  And it’s not as if anybody is looking for coded language in which to say: “Health care—who needs it?” or “Special interests and lobbyists—give them a break,” let alone “Dr. King’s dream—what a snooze.” It’s more that the prevailing drivel assumes that every adult in the country is a completely illiterate jerk who would rather feel than think and who must furthermore be assumed, for a special season every four years, to imagine that everyone else “in America” or in “this country” is unemployed or starving or sleeping under a bridge. The next assumption made by the drivel is that only a new president (or perhaps a sitting president who is somehow eager to run against Washington and everything else in his hometown) can possibly cure all these ills. The non sequitur is breathtaking. The more I could be brought to believe in a stupid incantation such as “Washington Is Broken,” the less inclined I would be to pay the moving expenses to bring a failed Mormon crowd-pleaser and flip-flopper to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And this was the best that a supposed “full-spectrum conservative” could come up with by way of rhetoric. At this rate, Senator John McCain will have to campaign as a radical post-Castroite to deal with the perceptions that (a) he’s too old and (b) the Republicans are too WASP-dominated.

  How well I remember Sidney Blumenthal waking me up all those years ago to read me the speech by Senator Biden, which, by borrowing the biography as well as the words of another candidate’s campaign, put an end to Biden’s own. The same glee didn’t work this time when he (it must have been he) came up with “Change You Can Xerox” as a riposte to Senator Obama’s hand from Governor Deval Patrick. All that Obama had lifted from Patrick was the old-fashioned idea that “words matter,” and all that one can say, reviewing the present empty landscape of slogan and cliché, is that one only wishes that this could once again be true.

  (Slate, March 3, 2008)

  This Was Not Looting

  ONCE AGAIN, a major story gets top billing in a “mainstream paper”—and is printed upside down. “Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says.” This was how the New York Times led its front page on Sunday. According to the supporting
story, Dr. Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, says that after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, “looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein’s most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms.”

  As printed, the implication of the story was not dissimilar from the al-Qaeda disclosures, which featured so much in the closing days of the presidential election last fall. In that case, a huge stock of conventional highexplosives had been allowed to go missing and was presumably in the hands of those who were massacring Iraqi civilians and killing coalition troops. At least one comment from the Bush campaign surrogate appeared to blame this negligence on the troops themselves. Followed to one possible conclusion, the implication was clear: The invasion of Iraq had made the world a more dangerous place by randomly scattering all sorts of weaponry, including mass-destruction weaponry, to destinations unknown.

  It was eye-rubbing to read of the scale of this potential new nightmare. There in cold print was the Al Hatteen “munitions production plant that international inspectors called a complete potential nuclear weapons laboratory.” And what of the Al Adwan facility, which “produced equipment used for uranium enrichment, necessary to make some kinds of nuclear weapons”? The overall pattern of the plundered sites was summarized thus, by reporters James Glanz and William J. Broad:

  The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs.

  My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn’t stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam’s propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq’s physicists as “our nuclear mujahideen.”

  My second question is: What’s all this about “looting”? The word is used throughout the long report, but here’s what it’s used to describe. “In four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 … teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. ‘The first wave came for the machines,’ Dr. Araji said. ‘The second wave, cables and cranes.’ ” Perhaps hedging the bet, the Times authors at this point refer to “organized looting.”

  But obviously, what we are reading about is a carefully planned military operation. The participants were not panicked or greedy civilians helping themselves, which is the customary definition of a “looter,” especially in wartime. They were mechanized and mobile and under orders, and acting in a concerted fashion. Thus, if the story is factually correct—which we have no reason at all to doubt—then Saddam’s Iraq was a fairly highly evolved WMD state, with a contingency plan for further concealment and distribution of the weaponry in case of attack or discovery.

  Before the war began, several of the administration’s critics argued that an intervention would be too dangerous, either because Saddam Hussein would actually unleash his arsenal of WMD, or because he would divert it to third parties. That case at least had the merit of being serious (though I would want to argue that a regime capable of doing either thing was a regime that urgently needed to be removed). Since then, however, the scene has dissolved into one long taunt and jeer: “There were no WMD in Iraq. Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

  The U.N. inspectors, who are solemnly quoted by Glanz and Broad as having “monitored” the alarming developments at Al Hatteen and elsewhere, don’t come out looking too professional, either. If by scanning satellite pictures now they can tell us that potentially thermonuclear stuff is on the loose, how come they couldn’t come up with this important data when they were supposedly “on the ground”?

  Even in the worst interpretation, it seems unlikely that the material is more dangerous now than it was two years ago. Some of the elements—centrifuges, for example, and chemical mixtures—require stable and controlled conditions for effectiveness. They can’t simply be transferred to some kitchen or tent. They are less risky than they were in early 2003, in other words. If they went to a neighboring state, though.… Some chemical vats have apparently turned up on a scrap heap in Jordan, even if this does argue more for a panicky concealment than a plan of transfer. But anyway, this only returns us to the main point: If Saddam’s people could have made such a transfer after his fall, then they could have made it much more easily during his reign. (We know, for example, that the Baathists were discussing the acquisition of long-range missiles from North Korea as late as March 2003, and at that time, the nuclear Wal-Mart of the A. Q. Khan network was still in business. Iraq would have had plenty to trade in this WMD underworld.)

  Supporters of the overdue disarmament and liberation of Iraq, all the same, can’t be complacent about this story. It seems flabbergasting that any of these sites were unsecured after the occupation, let alone for so long. Did the CIA yet again lack “human intelligence” as well as every other kind? The Bush administration staked the reputation of the United States on the matter. It won’t do to say that “mistakes were made.”

  (Slate, March 15, 2005)

  The Other L-Word

  WHEN CAROLINE KENNEDY managed to say “you know” more than 200 times in an interview with the New York Daily News, and on 130 occasions while talking to the New York Times during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class. If she had been a generation younger and a bit more déclassé, she would have been saying “like.” When asked if the Bush tax cuts should be repealed, she responded: “Well, you know, that’s something, obviously, that, you know, in principle and in the campaign, you know, I think that, um, the tax cuts, you know, were expiring and needed to be repealed.”

  This is an example of “filler” words being used as props, to try to shore up a lame sentence. People who can’t get along without “um” or “er” or “basically” (or, in England, “actually”) or “et cetera et cetera” are of two types: the chronically modest and inarticulate, such as Ms. Kennedy, and the mildly authoritarian who want to make themselves un-interruptible. Saul Bellow’s character Ravelstein is a good example of the latter: In order to deny any opening to a rival, he says “the-uh, the-uh” while searching for the noun or concept that is eluding him.

  Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of “like” has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables. But it didn’t start off that way, and might possibly be worth saving in a modified form.

  Its antecedents are not as ignoble as those of “you know.” It was used by the leader of the awesome Droogs in the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, who had possibly annexed it from the Beatnik Maynard G. Krebs, of Dobie Gillis. It was quasi-ironic in Scooby Doo by 1969, and self-satirizing by the time that Frank Zappa and Moon Unit deployed it (“Like, totally”) in their “Valley Girl” song in the early 1980s. It was then a part of the Californianization of American youth-speak. In an analysis drawing upon the wonderfully named Sonoma College linguist Birch Moonwomon’s findings, Penelope Eckert and Norma Mendoza-Denton phrase matters this way: “One of the innovative developments in the white English of Californians is the use of the discourse-marker ‘I’m like’ or ‘she’s like’ to introduce quoted speech, as in ‘I’m like, where have you been?’ This quotative is particularly useful because it does not require the quote to be of actual speech (as ‘she said’ would, for instance). A shrug, a sigh, or any of a number of expressive sounds as well as speech can follow it.”

&nb
sp; So it can be of use to a natural raconteur. Ian McEwan rather surprised me when I asked him about “like,” telling me that “it can be used as a pause or a colon: very handy for spinning out a mere anecdote into a playlet that’s full of parody and speculation.” And also of hyperbole, as in “She’s been out with, like, a million guys.”

  Its other main use is principally social, and defensive. You will have noticed the way in which “uptalk” has also been spreading among the young. “Uptalk” can be defined as an ostensibly declarative sentence that is uttered on a rising note of apology and that ends with an implied question mark. An example: the statement “I go to Columbia University?” which seems to say, “If that’s all right with you.” Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting “Okay” has deposed the more affirmative “Yes,” so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of “like” are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness. To report that “he was like, Yeah, whatever” is to struggle to say “He said” while minimizing the risk of commitment. (This could be why young black people don’t seem to employ “like” quite as often, having more challenging vernaculars such as “Nome sane?”—which looks almost Latin.)

  The actual grammatical battle was probably lost as far back as 1954, when Winston announced that its latest smoke “tasted good, like a cigarette should.” Complaints from sticklers that this should have been “as a cigarette should” (or, in my view, “as a cigarette ought to do”) were met by a second ad in which a gray-bunned schoolmarm type was taunted by cheery consumers asking, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?” Usage of “like” has now almost completely replaced “as,” except in the case of that other quite infectious youth expression “as if,” which would now be in danger of being rendered “Like, as if.”